Meet Stephanie Olson | restauWant Founder & Campaign Director

We had the good fortune of connecting with Stephanie Olson and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Stephanie, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
This question is kind of funny to think about, because it almost feels as though there was never another option for me. I have always felt drawn to problem-solving: innovating solutions where they didn’t yet exist, or filling gaps in those that did to do something better or more comprehensively.

I started my first business at eighteen and built it through college. I wanted to learn everything. I began with a limited skillset, of course, at that age, but it was practically useful: web development and graphic design. I had tinkered with this for personal projects and realized it could be done better than it was in my area at the time. So I reached out to business owners, posted my portfolio, and began working on projects. Working on these projects, I began noticing more digital integrations that should work differently or better-particularly mobile applications and marketing systems-observing and isolating customer touchpoints that either didn’t exist (and should) or existed and could be improved.

This was all about empathy for the customer and the business: what could make their lives easier?
Let’s do more of that.

Iterating on this for over a decade allowed me to expand my skillset substantially. I was working on projects encompassing everything from print design to user experience audits to mobile application database development to complex marketing automation workflows. Everything was related, in my mind, at least tangentially, because taking a step back would allow me to isolate connections between systems, the customer and the business. From here, I had the opportunity to ideate and problem solve.

Delving deep into the marketing side of business operations fascinated me. There are an infinite number of paths you can take to build a business. The “why” needs to be informed by your mission, your unique story. The “how” needs to be driven by data. This union of creativity and mathematics lit a fire in me, an enthusiasm that only grew stronger when I saw the impact it had on businesses and their customers.

Many people have a negative perception of marketing, but I see marketing as connecting people with products and services that will add value to their lives. This is a symbiotic relationship. We have the ability to create and nurture these relationships using technology and creativity, and that fact excites me.

I am also a foodie. I love cooking and eating new dishes, trying new cuisines, learning about ingredients and cultures and flavors that bring meals to the table in scrumptious fashion. I am fortunate to have gone restaurant-hopping through several countries around the globe.

In seeking to discover restaurants everywhere, I realized something: many of the best restaurants I visited had the lowest visibility. I lamented seeing some of my local favorites close down due to COVID. I took a step back to think about what I was working on professionally, primarily for tech and SaaS companies, companies with the luxury of higher profit margins. Could this data-driven, cross-channel marketing approach efficiently and effectively translate to restaurants?

It could. It does.

I spent months researching how marketing had generally been done for restaurants to identify trends and opportunities for improvement, interpolating between typical strategies of high-budget corporations with complex, large-scale systems effective for scaling growth and customer acquisition methods typical of most restaurants. Marketing strategies vary wildly from company to company and of course from restaurant to restaurant, but it was clear that most often, restaurants were not leveraging technology to get ahead in the way that they could.

So I set about distilling more than a decade of strategic, cross-platform thinking to systems and action items that translate to restaurants’ unique operations and challenges. This is unique to each restaurant, but the way we approach developing strategies is working backwards from goals. Metrics to aim for, informed by each restaurants’ unique data and achieved using campaigns creatively highlighting their unique story to make it exciting and compelling and to resonate with their customers.

And thus, restauWant was born.

What should our readers know about your business?
restauWant is the culmination of over a decade of cross-functional technical, marketing, and business learning and overwhelming enthusiasm and passion for the restaurant industry. We are unique in the comprehensive, creative, solution-driven, data-driven approach that we take with our restaurant clients.

People always smile when they say “restauWant”, because they think it’s clever or weird. Etymologically, it’s the union of the words “restaurant” and “want”. Pragmatically, this aligns with our mission to generate demand for restaurants: “People WANT to eat your food, they just don’t KNOW you yet.” Realistically, it sounds quite silly when you say it out loud.

We have fun working as a team and with our clients, but we take what we do very seriously. We have a deep respect and appreciation for restaurant businesses: they feed their communities, they provide jobs, they create and innovate in a competitive and difficult market. So much must go right for a business like this to run smoothly, and they are faced with either taking the loss or taking the heat from consumers when costs increase. Restaurants are a labor of love. We want to be an asset to our restaurant clients by making the customer acquisition and retention and experience side of operations as smooth as possible. By attracting and nurturing customers who will love and appreciate these restaurants, we are able to build connections that benefit both the restaurant business and the customer. We feel incredibly fortunate to be a part of something so meaningful.

Getting to where we are now was certainly not easy—years of late nights and weekends worked led up to the knowledge and experience required to oversee such a wide range of marketing and development initiatives—but that doesn’t really matter now. That tenacity allowed for restauWant to happen and for me to be who I am today, waking up and doing what I love supporting people and businesses I admire.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
If I were writing an itinerary for a week in Atlanta, I would begin with Buford Highway. Even when I lived an hour and a half north of the city, I drove often to Buford Highway to visit restaurants and markets. Such incredible diversity, fresh, variable ingredients and cuisines and flavors—makes the heart sing!

After becoming deliciously full at some of those amazing restaurants, I would say a visit to Midtown’s Art District is in order. The High Museum and the Alliance Theatre are some of my favorites, and Divan at the Castle or Colony Square nearby are stunning stops for your next meal.

An hour or two north and east out of the city, you can find some stunning hiking spots, many with beautiful waterfalls, which are my favorite weekend past time. My favorite trail is probably Bearden Falls, a trail less traveled but with a stunning waterfall view at the end. Or perhaps Cloudland Canyon, a farther trek and more popular, but with stunning waterfall views. Or maybe Emery Creek. We are fortunate to have so many beautiful hiking trails here in Georgia!

I would also suggest exploring the Beltline, Ponce City Market, and Krog Street Market. Incredible people, food, and art all around!

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
My family, especially my partner and my daughter and my sister, who have always been there with love and support when the volume of work became difficult and overwhelming. They remind me to take care of myself first, and spending time with them is very grounding, reminding me of what’s most important in life.

Website: https://restauWant.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/restauWant

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/restauwant

Twitter: https://x.com/restau_want

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/go.restauWant

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@restauWant

Image Credits
Andrew Spanjer
Stephanie Olson